A grammar/parts of speech question

I used to teach EFL and have studied several foreign languages, but the odd thing still makes me exercise ze little grey cells.

One I remember was when I was doing an OU course on the 19thC novel, and someone on our student email group asked why ‘nineteenth century’ was sometimes hyphenated and sometimes not, since she was anxious not to make a mistake in her essay.

I hadn’t actually thought about it before, but when I did, it dawned that it was because in e.g. ‘the nineteenth-century novel’ the two combined words are an adjective describing ‘novel’, whereas in e.g. ‘During the nineteenth century…’ they are an adjective and a noun.

I will admit to being something of a nerd when it comes to words and language generally. I have a dd much the same, so we can enjoy being thoroughly nerdy together.

Elegran

growstuff So you can "attempt the difficult", where the adjective is used as a noun to generalise something for its difficulty.

The OP's example, 'You are being difficult.' is still a description (adjective) of the state of the person addressed, however, not of them being a general personification of difficulty.

Yes, it is still an adjective in that example.

An example of nominalized adjectives is "the good, the bad and the ugly".

It was difficult to describe.

Here difficult is an adjective describing it!

It being what is known as a false subject and difficult a predicate, due to the verb being the present tense of to be.

To be does not take an object like most verbs, but a predicate, as whatever follows to be is usually identical with the subject.

Bear with me: I realise this is as clear as mud. Here is an example to explain things better.

"My father was a doctor." Here "my father" and "a doctor" mentioned in the sentence are clearly one and the same person. This is how "to be" and a few other verbs, notably "to become" work in a sentence.

If you swing your sentence around and write what in my opinion would be a poorer sentence, grammatically, and put "to decide was difficult" some people might argue that "difficult" here is an adverb. Others would argue that it is still an adjective here and being used in exactly the same way as in your sentence.

Difficult is one of the many adjectives that are used as adverbs without adding -ly.

Would you feel happier with your prose if you wrote "deciding was difficult" instead of "it was difficult to decide".

To me both are grammatically correct. It is a matter of style or personal preference which is better.

Sorry, forgot the second query, but see it has been answered by others.

grandtant It's not being used as an adverb because "to decide* is a noun phrase, therefore a noun is still being described and it's still an adjective.

PS. "deciding" is a gerund, therefore is treated as a noun.

It's an adjective in both phrases. Instead of saying 'you are being difficult', substitute 'awkward' for 'difficult'. 'Awkward' in the context is, indisputably an adjective, qualifying 'you' and the same applies to 'difficult'. I know I am using an 'old fashioned' grammatical term in'qualifying', but don't think the grammar they teach for SATS has anything better!